Belle considered. “Better stay down at the Milford’s to do your playing,” she answered. “It might bother Aunt Maria to have a boy romping around here.”
So Georgina fared forth, after taking off her prism and hanging it in a safe place. Only Captain Kidd frisked down to meet her when she stood under the studio window and gave the alley yodel which Richard had taught her. There was no answer. She repeated it several times, and then Mr. Moreland appeared at the window, in his artist’s smock with a palette on his thumb and a decidedly impatient expression on his handsome face. Richard was posing, he told her, and couldn’t leave for half an hour. His tone was impatient, too, for he had just gotten a good start after many interruptions.
Undecided whether to go back home or sit down on the sand and wait, Georgina stood looking idly about her. And while she hesitated, Manuel and Joseph and Rosa came straggling along the beach in search of adventure.
It came to Georgina like an inspiration that it wasn’t Barby who had forbidden her to play with them, it was Tippy. And with a vague feeling that she was justified in disobeying her because of her recent crossness, she rounded them up for a chase over the granite slabs of the breakwater. If they would be Indians, she proposed, she’d be the Deerslayer, like the hero of the Leather-Stocking Tales, and chase ’em with a gun.
They had never heard of those tales, but they were more than willing to undertake any game which Georgina might propose. So after a little coaching in war-whoops, with a battered tin pan for a tom-tom, three impromptu Indians sped down the beach under the studio windows, pursued by a swift-footed Deerslayer with flying curls. The end of a broken oar was her musket, which she brandished fiercely as she echoed their yells.
Mr. Moreland gave a groan of despair as he looked at his model when those war-whoops broke loose. Richard, who had succeeded after many trials in lapsing into the dreamy attitude which his father wanted, started up at the first whoop, so alert and interested that his nostrils quivered. He scented excitement of some kind and was so eager to be in the midst of it that the noise of the tom-tom made him wriggle in his chair.
He looked at his father appealingly, then made an effort to settle down into his former attitude. His body assumed the same listless pose as before, but his eyes were so eager and shining with interest that they fairly spoke each time the rattly drumming on the tin pan sounded a challenge.
“It’s no use, Dicky,” said his father at last. “It’s all up with us for this time. You might as well go on. But I wish that little tom-boy had stayed at home.”
And Richard went, with a yell and a hand-spring, to throw in his lot with Manuel and Joseph and be chased by the doughty Deer-slayer and her hound. In the readjustment of parts Rosa was told to answer to the name of Hector. It was all one to Rosa whether she was hound or redskin, so long as she was allowed a part in the thrilling new game. Richard had the promise of being Deer-slayer next time they played it.
